Companies often rely on electronic mail (email) messages to interact with their customers. For example, a company may provide technical support through email messages. To provide technical support through email messages, a company may offer a general email message address to which customers can direct inquiries and requests for assistance. In response to a customer email message that is sent to the general email message address (support@xyzcompany.com, for instance), an agent within the company's technical support department may provide an email message response that answers the customer's inquiry or provides the requested assistance. For example, a customer of a peripheral device provider for computer systems may encounter difficulties in configuring a particular peripheral device. The customer may send an email message requesting assistance to the peripheral device provider. In the email message, the customer may describe a computing environment in which he or she is installing the peripheral device and provide specific details about the configuration difficulties. In response to the customer's email message, an agent in the peripheral device provider's technical support department may reply with instructions for configuring the peripheral device within the customer's specific computing environment.
Since agents in a company's technical support department may receive hundreds or thousands of customer email messages each day, a company may use computer hardware and software (a computer system) to process a large volume of customer email messages. The computer system may assist the company's technical support department by automating several of the tasks related to processing email messages. For example, the computer system may analyze the email message to determine its particularized subject matter and route the email message to a service agent that is likely able to respond to the email message. Or, the computer system may have the capability to “auto-respond.” In an auto-response system, the computer system may create a response based on an entry in a response database and send the response to the customer without intervention from a human agent.
Some computer systems facilitate delivery of dynamic content in email messages. For example, a company's marketing computer system may send a large number of email messages to email addresses associated with the company's previous customers, in order, for example, to advertise an upcoming sale. An email message may comprise text and a link to other material stored within the marketing computer system. When a previous customer accesses one of the email messages, the link may cause an indication to be received by the marketing computer system. The indication may indicate that the email message has been accessed and may serve as a request for the other material. The marketing computer system may then send the other material, which might include graphics or multimedia objects, along with time-sensitive price or sale information. Delivering dynamic content may allow the company to minimize the size of each marketing email message and to control, at a global level, information that is disseminated to the previous customers.